DJ Enright, who has died of cancer aged 82, was the unsung hero of postwar British poetry.

An outside bet - and reluctant candidate - as poet laureate in 1984, he was in most respects a deeply unBritish poet, one whose best-known poems are set in the distant parts where he worked much of his life. It is hard to think of a poet whom other poets held in more affection.

That affection was stirred by the intelligence and integrity he brought to a range of writing: his novel Academic Year (1955), his Memoirs Of A Mendicant Professor (1969), his essays, reviews, anthologies and children's books. But the real affection was for the man: gentle-mannered but uncompromising, tough-minded but humane, above all funny - a person for whom the adjective "sardonic" was invented.

Enright was born in Leamington. His father was Irish and a postman, his mother Welsh and a chapel-goer. When, in his 50s, he wrote about his working-class, Black Country upbringing, in the excellent, anecdotal The Terrible Shears (1973), even when recounting social snobbery, he remains affectionate, wry: "How docile the lower orders were/ In those days! Having done/ Unexpectedly well in the School Cert,/ I was advised by the headmaster to leave school/ At once and get a job before they found/ A mistake in the examination results."

Enright was taught at Downing College, Cambridge, by FR Leavis and contributed to the magazine Scrutiny. His tutor's idea that literature can and should enlarge our moral universe was one that never left him.

He taught overseas - mainly in south Asian universities from 1947 to 1970 - by default: as a disciple of Leavis he could not get a job in British universities. But in Alexandria (1947-50) - where he met his French wife, Madeleine - he found life a good deal more attractive than in ration-book Britain. He mixed with locals, and could be adventurous in his enthusiasm for indigenous customs.

Stubbornly independent, and thus an object of mistrust to the British Embassy and foreign governments, Enright twice provoked diplomatic incidents. The first was in Bangkok, where he was British Council professor at Chulalongkorn University (1957-59). Driving home late, he found his route blocked by a police car whose occupants were visiting a brothel: gently closing the car door to pass, he was set upon by 15 policemen who, as he described it in his autobiography, were obliged "to beat me up in self-defence". A night in a prison cell followed. The embassy told him he was "a disgrace". Though innocent, he lost his contract.

In his inaugural lecture at the University of Singapore in 1960, he offended the newly elected government, was denounced as a "mendicant professor", almost lost his work permit and became the centre of what became known as "the Enright Affair" (even the Times in London carried reports). Fortunately, the students' union backed him (he was a much-loved professor, in all the places he professed) and after he had written a conciliatory letter, the affair blew over.

Enright remained in Singapore for 10 years. By this point, he was well-established as a writer, having published four novels and six collections of poems. He had also earned himself a footnote in literary history by being the first person to anthologise the poets who became known as the Movement: Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Enright himself among them. He did this in 1955 from Japan, where he was visiting professor at Konan University (1953-56). Earlier still, as a reviewer for the Catholic journal the Month, Enright had been almost the only English critic to notice Larkin's privately printed collection XX Poems, and to praise it resoundingly.

With hindsight, Enright's association with Larkin and the Movement looks like a bit of a joke - where they were little-Englanders, he wrote poems about foreign bargirls and beggars; where they embraced reason and moderation, he found them a strain: "You think it is easy, all this sanity?/ Try it. It will send you mad."

But he shared some Movement prejudices - against Dylan Thomas and surrealism, for example - and has that vein of Larkin in him which attends to, and is tender towards, ordinary, unnoticed lives. The difference is that the people he writes about are not Brits or even westerners: noodle-vendors, shoeshine boys, typhoon victims, "the roughly estimated ones", the "more or less anonymous" - these are the people who stir his empathy. As he once put it: "Only one subject to write about: pity./ Self-pity: the only subject to avoid."

A 1950s trip to Hiroshima left its mark. So did his experience of Berlin, where he lectured at the Free University (1956-57). This forced him to confront his Leavisite assumptions about the civilising powers of high art. (A couple of bitter German poems, No Offence and Apocalypse, ensued.)

But playfulness was Enright's more customary method for dealing with sombre themes. His poems are never more punning than when faced with the unpalatable realities of the age: "In this vale of teargas/ Should one enter a caveat/ Or a monastery?" Even a poem about Hiroshima victims inspires some bleak and risky word-play: "Little of peace for them to rest in, less of them to rest in peace:/ Dust to dust a swift transition, ashes to ash with awful ease."

Pity moved Enright to write his best poems, but he was never sentimental or misty-eyed. His defence of liberal humanism was unwavering, but he understood its insufficiency. He would have liked to "strike that special tone,/ Wholly truthful, intimate/ And utterly unsparing,/ A man communing with himself", but if self-communing meant shutting out the noisy world he did not think it a tone worth achieving.

Part of his strength was that he went on worrying away at the morality of poetry. Poet Wondering What He Is Up To is the title of one of his best poems, but he could find no simple answer, except that there is none: "To miss and miss and miss/ And then to have, and still to know/ That you must miss and miss anew."

Back in England, Enright co-edited Encounter magazine (1970-72). Chatto & Windus's managing director, Norah Smallwood, made him an editor and gave him a place on the board (1974-82).

He had his successes there, notably his partin encouraging Terence Kilmartin's revision of the Scott-Moncrieff Proust. And in his old-fashioned, legend-in-his-own-lunchtime, pipe-smoking way, he even seemed to fit in.

But he could not pretend to be very happy: commercial values, he thought, were taking over, and the crassest titles being taken on. "We just bought a book about weight lifters," he complained one day to Paul Theroux (to whom he had earlier given a Singapore teaching job). "Can you imagine? Weight lifters?" Enright was too sceptical, world-weary, unimpressible to feel at home in the gung-ho climate of a modern publishing house.

After leaving Chatto, he continued to write poetry, to translate and edit with Madeleine - taking over some of the Englishing of Proust became one of their tasks - and to review.

Literary editors approaching Dennis with a possible assignment would have to listen to a good deal of sighing, groaning or even hysterical laughter before, as he invariably did, he would say yes. The copy would come back word-perfect a few days later.

As a reviewer, as with everything, he was his own man. He could be generous, but because he measured literature by the yardsticks of Shakespeare, Proust and Goethe an acerbic note was more common.

Perhaps it was this ability to dish it out that made Dennis tolerant of those who had written unkind reviews of him - as I found after callowly dumping on his collection A Faust Book (1979), a review which angered and upset him but which he did not hold against me when we later met.

In his retirement, pressed to draw on his wide reading and unable to stop working, he became an expert anthologist. His two biggest endeavours were The Oxford Book Of Death (1983) - a task which he said he found energising rather than depressing - and The Faber Book Of Fevers And Frets (1989), copies of which he liked to inscribe "from the NHS".

It is for the wit, compassion and self-mockery of his poetry that Dennis will be remembered. Some critics, like the late Donald Davie, used to argue that, though admirable, these qualities so inhibited Enright that he lacked the amoral ferocity which great poetry requires.

Tant pis, he would surely have replied: if great artists are not humane, then he did not want to be one. When asked once if he had ever seen the phrase "obsessive humanity" applied to his work, he replied that he had not: "But I wouldn't object to it. What else is there to be obsessed with?"

He is survived by his wife Madeleine, their daughter, and three grandchildren. · Dennis Joseph Enright, poet, born March 11 1920; died December 31 2002